Definitely, this commentary will offend some. (If you're my direct supervisor, you can stop reading here.) It's a good thing I'm using a pseudonym. After I attended an international conferences on elearning, it's impossible not to feel like I work in a backwater. The irony is that I would feel the same wherever I was, probably, and whatever I was doing.

What was once cutting edge becomes passe very quickly in terms of digital functionalities. Building for online learning means working in an environment of dynamic constraints. Budgetary guidelines may mean that spendy software may be off the list. (As an example, one of the software programs we had virtually demoed for us came in at about $4000 for the first license.) Then, there's the learning curve to master software. For newcomers into the ID field, if you haven't grown up with some hours of multimedia development daily for the past couple years, you'll be woefully behind.

Then, there's the "authorizing environment." The authorizers would be the supervisors, the instructors, and the subject matter experts. The student "audience" or "market" also "authorize" what may or may not be created for the virtual learning.

Then, there's the Net and Web infrastructures...the courseware / learning management system limits.

By contrast, the digital universe has innovators pushing at limits and adaptive private companies pushing the edges of the possible. Heavy funders like the military create synergies by funding innovative games and projects, replete with data-rich research.

All this becomes apparent in international conferences. I come back with cool ideas about what others are doing and think, "Hey, we could..." And then the next few weeks involve coming off the "high" (as in a Csikszentmihalyi "flow") of a conference and re-acclimating to the real-world of the possible, which has been expanded just a little bit by the exposure.